Spring Awakening

"It’s about adolescent sexuality and it’s extremely explicit insofar as it addresses abortion, homosexuality, unwanted pregnancy, masturbation, and suicide. All these subjects come up in the play because the kids are awakening to their sexuality but they’re not given an education about it. One of the paradigmatic, or iconic, quotes from the book is when a kid in the play opens the encyclopaedia in his school to try to discover something about sex but there’s nothing in it. The kid says: what’s the use of a book that doesn’t tell you about the most important thing? So the play is really a plea for a kind of education to guide adolescents that need it. The most important fact about Spring Awakening is that Wedekind wrote it in 1891 and it wasn’t produced in Berlin until 1906. That tells you volumes. The topics that he addressed were so controversial they couldn’t be put on stage. It took a decade and a half to even produce this play. I think that comes down to disagreements about childhood sexuality itself. Keep in mind that right around the time Wedekind is writing his play there’s a psychiatrist in Vienna starting his own research and writing about childhood sexuality. The Freudian revolution at its heart starts with the assertion that all human beings, from birth—indeed, in utero—are sexual beings. But there’s no consensus on that claim, in Europe or anywhere. If you don’t believe that kids are sexual and think that they shouldn’t be, it’s not a big jump to think that sexual information presented too early could both corrupt their minds and also make other evil people regard them as prematurely sexual. I think that’s lessened in recent years. It’s lessened for a very stark historical reason, which is the AIDS epidemic. The AIDS epidemic changed everything, but especially the dialogue about Sex Education. Before AIDS, there were people who were against Sex Education and people who were for it. After AIDS, everyone became for it. They just became for different kinds of it. People who formerly had said ‘the school has no business touching this subject’ couldn’t say that any more. AIDS was just too omnipresent, too awful, too scary. So the likes of Philip Schlaffer and Jerry Falwell—the heroines and heroes of the New Right—became advocates of Sex Education. But, of course, they called it ‘abstinence education’. But ‘abstinence education’ includes discussions of sex, without a doubt, and that’s revolutionary in its own way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think it’s fair to say that conservatives have backed off the idea that any sexual discussion is inherently corrupting. I’ll give you another example that I love . The summer before last there was a debate about abortion on the floor of congress and a Republican pro-lifer, himself a physician, got up to make a pro-life testament. He said ‘listen, I’m an obstretician and I can tell you that in utero I can see erections.’ I wrote a piece about this saying this guy just gave up the game. Because for a century conservatives had claimed that kids are not sexual beings, and he was actually acknowledging that they are. Of course, this was in the context of an anti-abortion screed. But it’s illustrative of a really important and under-appreciated change in the way Conservatives have regarded the subject: from something that’s taboo inherently and must be taboo, to something that must be addressed, albeit in a conservative way."